[Grammar] position of nouns in prepositional phrases

[wynnmyintuu]

Can the two sentences "she went out. " and "I did not know it." be rewritten as "She went out without me knowing (it)." ?

 

[emsr2d2]

Can the two sentences "She went out" and "I did not know it" be rewritten as "She went out without me knowing (it)"?

Note my corrections above. When you quote complete sentences, you need to start them with a capital letter inside the quotation marks. I have removed all three of your full stops. Don't use them (even if they appear in the original quoted sentence) unless it's also the end of your sentence. Your sentence starts with "Can" and ends with a question mark so there should be no full stops anywhere in between them.

 

[jutfrank]

I have removed all three of your full stops. Don't use them (even if they appear in the original quoted sentence) unless it's also the end of your sentence. Your sentence starts with "Can" and ends with a question mark so there should be no full stops anywhere in between them.

Just to say I disagree with this. It makes more sense to leave the full stops in. The point is that a sentence can be embedded inside another sentence. If a capital letter marks the beginning of an embedded sentence, why not mark the end?

 

[GoesStation]

Just to say I disagree with this. It makes more sense to leave the full stops in. The point is that a sentence can be embedded inside another sentence. If a capital letter marks the beginning of an embedded sentence, why not mark the end?

Do any style guides support leaving final punctuation in quoted sentences that don't end the sentence in which they appear? I agree that the practice might be logically defensible, but I think it would be a disservice to learners to promote it when few if any publishers allow it.

 

[jutfrank]

I think it would be a disservice to learners to promote it when few if any publishers allow it.

I take your point. We would not want to mislead the learners in any way. The issue here is that we are not writing to be published so should we follow a publisher's style guide?

What makes the language we use on this forum special is that we constantly have to use language to talk about and make reference to language itself. This can be quite confusing at times, and a particular challenge for our non-native members.

I feel it's a better service to the users of the forum to be clear about what we are trying to communicate, than to pedantically follow the style advice of organisations who have nothing to do with the genre of English usage web forums.

(I anticipate I might be alone on this issue.)

 

[GoesStation]

If most learners here are trying to achieve a level of English suitable for a career requiring the ability to write clear English, I think we should promote widely-accepted usage. I agree that writing about the language and quoting usage examples is challenging, but I think we should stick with common rules.

 

[jutfrank]

If most learners here are trying to achieve a level of English suitable for a career requiring the ability to write clear English, I think we should promote widely-accepted usage.

It seems to me that we should be encouraging learners to think for themselves about how they can write clearly, to be above all aware of the effect of how they write on their readers, across a range of genres and registers.

 

[jutfrank]

Right. And that means pointing out things that are generally considered incorrect.

Of course.

Those who feel adventurous can ignore our advice. Those who hope to get good marks in examinations would be wise to follow it.

The wise would listen to different voices before making up their minds. You've missed my point about genre differences. What may be acceptable in one genre may not be in another. Writing in exams and writing on web forums are not the same.

The best we can do is advise our learners based on what they want to do with the language. To give advice that is overgeneralised and unjustified could also be considered as doing a disservice.

My advice to those taking exams is this: during your exam, if you are writing a story where you need to report what somebody said, then follow the advice given in post #3.

 

[jutfrank]

[We] base our responses on what is generally regarded as acceptable/correct.

I don't necessarily disagree but of course the challenges of this are that:

We all have different judgements of what is generally regarded as acceptable.
We have different ideas of what is correct.

But the wider issue for me here is that there is no authority to which we can defer. I think that this is our main point of disagreement here. From my observations of previous discussions, it seems to me that Piscean's view is that the authority should be frequency of usage. Emsr2d2's authority seems to be conventions. GoesStation's authority seems to be style guides. And my authority seems to be what's the most effective way of communicating (or rather--what I think is the best way!) There are pros and cons to all these attitudes, I think.

I hate to misrepresent anybody's views, and I certainly don't mean any disrespect. I'm just trying to develop the issue raised here in a productive (albeit provocative!) way.

 

[emsr2d2]

Regarding my previous post, I don't believe I was basing it on convention. As far as I'm concerned, including the full stop in the quotes when it doesn't mark the end of the sentence outside the quotes is flat out wrong. Of course we don't have an authority to which we can defer but we could say that about any aspect of the language.

If someone here says that a canine animal is spelt "dogg", I'm pretty sure we would all tell that user that that's wrong. It's "dog". There is no official authority dictating that but we would still say that "dog" is the correct spelling.

 

[jutfrank]

If someone here says that a canine animal is spelt "dogg", I'm pretty sure we would all tell that user that that's wrong. It's "dog". There is no official authority dictating that but we would still say that "dog" is the correct spelling.

Yes, but we should theoretically be able to justify why we think it's the correct spelling. We have to draw on some authority. We could in theory all agree but for different reasons.

 

[jutfrank]

Our authorities for spellings are dictionaries. All modern dictionaries base their spellings on the way native-speaking writers the words. If we don't have faith in the dictionaries, we can check every citation of the word in every corpus we have access to. When we find that 99.9+% of spellings of the word are d o g, I think we have justification for saying that that is the correct spelling, and that other versions are incorrect.

But if we were to spell the word 'dog' as g o d, then the reason why it wouldn't be correct is that nobody would understand it! Not because it goes against what a dictionary says.

 

[jutfrank]

It's common usage, confirmed by corpora and then dictionaries that constitute the authority you said in post #15 we needed.

For the spelling of words, yes, I think that's very reasonable.

But there are alternative ways to spell 'dog' that do not appear in dictionaries (dogg, dawg), so it's not quite so simple. An alternative form may constitute an extremely small percentage of spellings, but at the same time be the best possible form to give the desired effect. Again, you have to think foremost about the effect you want to have on the reader.